Boom and Bust on the Great Plains: Deja Vu All Over Again

• Publication year: 2022

41 Creighton L. Rev. 385. BOOM AND BUST ON THE GREAT PLAINS: DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

Creighton Law Review

Vol. 41

SANDRA ZELLMER(fn*)

INTRODUCTION

Two books published in 2006 provide a compelling portrait of the "boom and bust" cycles that have plagued the Great Plains since European settlement. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl(fn1) and Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the High Plains(fn2) stand beside Mark Reisner's classic study of western water resources, Cadillac Desert,(fn3) and Wallace Stegner's tribute to one of America's greatest conservationists, Cross ing the Next Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West,(fn4) as "must read" books for anyone who cares about the future of the American West, particularly the Great Plains.

New York Times reporter Timothy Egan gives voice to the survivors of the Dust Bowl in The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.(fn5) Egan covers the region most affected by the Dust Bowl, from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles to southeast Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. His retrospective, constructed from interviews, journals, and newspaper accounts, depicts how drought, together with improvident agricultural and settlement policies and the Great Depression, combined to impose "the nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster."(fn6)

Meanwhile, in Ogallala Blue, William Ashworth, an environmental historian, provides a collection of contemporary case studies set in various places throughout the Great Plains region.(fn7) Through his vivid portrayals of local landscapes and the individuals that populate them, Ashworth captures the deep-rooted sense of place of Great Plains communities. Their stories are deftly interwoven against a backdrop of geologic time and scale, situated (precariously, in some cases) above the vast Ogallala (High Plains) Aquifer. He demonstrates the importance of "this bounty of buried water" to residents as well as the nation at large.(fn8) The fourteen million acres of crops overlying the aquifer comprise over one-fifth of the total annual harvest in the United States, and the vast majority of those crops rely on groundwater for irrigation.(fn9) Ashworth explores the billion dollar question - what will happen to the crops and the people who rely on them when the Ogallala Aquifer goes dry, as portions of it are likely to do within our lifetimes.

This Article reviews The Worst Hard Time and Ogallala Blue, situating their stories within the context of American law governing western settlement, agriculture, and soil and water management. In the wake of the Dust Bowl, federal, state, and local laws evolved and began to require more sustainable farming practices to control soil erosion. This evolution, and the events that fostered it, are described in Part I, below. Part II considers the post-World War II reliance on groundwater pumping to irrigate crops in the Great Plains region, as described in Ogallala Blue, and the law's tepid response to overdraft and its adverse effects. Finally, in Part III, the Article turns to the latest economic boom - ethanol production - and assesses its implications for the Great Plains and its human and natural communities. The Article concludes that the recently adopted federal Energy Bill, which requires increased reliance on biofuels, particularly corn-based ethanol, raises the specter of another "boom and bust" for Great Plains soil and water resources - deja vu all over again.

I. BOOM AND BUST I: CONQUERING LAND, CONQUERING PEOPLE

No one need be in doubt about the sharp change in climate that occurs somewhere between the 96th and 100th meridians. It can be felt on the lips and skin, observed in the characteristic plant and animal life, seen in the clarity and/or dustiness of the atmosphere, determined by measurements of rainfall and evaporation, tested by attempts at unaided agriculture. Practically every western traveler in the early years remarked the facts of aridity . . . .(fn10)

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on an expedition along the Missouri River in hopes of discovering an all-water route to the Pacific Northwest to secure the nation's Manifest Destiny - "an integrated nation that stretched from sea to sea."(fn11) Lewis and Clark found an immense "storehouse of biodiversity" as they traveled through the northern Great Plains.(fn12) Far from discovering "a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians,"(fn13) as skeptics had predicted, the expedition encountered numerous American Indian tribes, some of which provided them with guidance, food, and shelter, and hundreds of new species of plants and animals.(fn14) On the return trip in 1804, members of the expedition marveled at the vast grasslands of the Great Plains, especially the expanses of twelve foot high bluestem, "well calculated for the sweetest and most nourishing hay."(fn15)

Despite its endemic biological and cultural diversity, early maps labeled the Great Plains region "The Great American Desert,"(fn16) and subsequent explorers continued to call it "a desolate waste of uninhabited solitude . . . wholly uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their subsistence."(fn17) Yet it was a region uniquely suited to its occupants. Bison and antelope grazed on native prairie grasses that were well adapted to climatic extremes, such as drought, wind, fire, and freezing weather. "As long as the weave of grass was stitched to the land, the prairie would flourish in dry years and wet. The grass could look brown and dead, but beneath the surface, the roots held the soil in place; it was alive and dormant."(fn18)

The nation's dreams of Manifest Destiny, however, called "for the consumption of land and resources on an unprecedented scale" and motivated the United States' policies of wildlife eradication and Indian removal.(fn19) Although American Indian tribes were the "undisputed possessors of the soil, from time immemorial,"(fn20) the "conquest" and appropriation of tribal lands during the nineteenth century was deemed necessary to clear the way for western settlement.(fn21) By the late 1800s, the U.S. government had virtually eradicated both the buffalo and the Indians that had relied on the buffalo for nearly all of their subsistence needs.(fn22)

Meanwhile, an early U.S. Geological Survey report proclaimed, "The High Plains continues to be the most alluring body of unoccupied land in the United States, and will remain such until the best means of their utilization have been worked out . . . ."(fn23) Indian removal was only one part of the plan. Settlers - farmers, in particular - were necessary to fully utilize the land. A primary means of promoting utilization was the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which authorized settlers to take up residence on 160-acre parcels and, with evidence of occupation and cultivation, receive a patent (title) to the land from the U.S. government.(fn24)

Many homesteaders were driven off the Plains by harsh winters and by recurring droughts in the 1870s and 1890s.(fn25) In the early 1900s, settlers returned to the area with their dreams and their plows, encouraged by boosters of dryland farming.(fn26) Hardy Campbell, author of Campbell's 1907 Soil Culture Manual, fueled those dreams by arguing that "rain follows the plow."(fn27) He was not alone in claiming that the commotion of plowing, along with the use of steam engines by farmers and railroads, would perturb the atmosphere and bring rain.(fn28) Along with Horace Greeley's "Go West, Young Man," Campbell's slogan induced easterners and European immigrants to move to the Great Plains to attempt to make a living by farming.(fn29) The railroads provided further enticements with cheap tickets, excursions, and festivities that created the illusion of abundant water resources in various western towns.(fn30)

The Homestead Act and the boosters were quite successful in stimulating western migration. In The Worst Hard Times, Egan introduces Texas homesteader Bam White, who, like Wallace Stegner's fictional Bo Mason, hoped to find his "big rock candy mountain" in the American West.(fn31) Bam viewed his homestead as "the last best chance to do something right, to get a small piece of the world and make it work."(fn32) After World War I, it appeared that Bam and other home-steaders had grounds for optimism. Wheat prices were high and rain was relatively plentiful, and settlers were motivated to plow and plant as much as possible.(fn33) The federal government encouraged them by urging them to break historic records for total crop yields, and they did.(fn34)

Across the nation, the feverish "Roaring Twenties," buoyed by the post-war economic boom, took hold. Rural and urban Americans alike spent unprecedented amounts of cash and credit to purchase automobiles and appliances, and more people than ever before engaged in speculation on the stock market.(fn35) Unfortunately, the spending frenzy was based on false premises. "Although businesses had made huge gains - 65 percent - from the mechanization of manufacturing, the average worker's wages had only increased 8 percent."(fn36)

With increased production came a glut on the global wheat market. Prices plummeted.(fn37) Then the stock market crashed on Black Tuesday...